Idlewild have expanded from three to five core members - and that's just the tip of drastic changes in store for fans of the Third Best Scottish Band of All Time, Roddy Woomble tells Brian Boyd
'New York City on the night of Halloween. High fiving and dressed up as Frankenstein. A walk around the Lower East Side the next morning blasting the records from the headphones. Half proud, half relieved. One final check and our fifth album is finally finished".
That was the message posted up on the website of Scottish rockers Idlewild after finishing Warnings/Promises. Here's an album that will greatly surprise their existing fan base while alerting previous unbelievers to their new musical cause. The Edinburgh band used to make an agreeable punk clatter - short and sharp rambunctious guitar attacks that sounded midway between The Stooges and The Cure. Self-deprecatingly, they used to describe their sound as a "flight-of-stairs falling down a flight-of-stairs".
"We were always perceived as a brash punk rock band," says lead singer Roddy Woomble, "and first impressions are really difficult to overcome. So we went with that description even though, in truth, we always saw ourselves as a more vaguely arty, literate rock band."
It's the latter band who win out on the new album. There's a lot more depth on evidence here as the band settle into a "mature" melodic rock band sound; at times sounding uncannily like early to middle-era R.E.M. (i.e.the time when they were good). There's a real rootsy approach here, with Woomble laying bare how country and folk music influenced him in his approach to this album.
"I really don't like that word `mature' - it's such a cliché," he says. "But I accept that it is going to be used to describe us now. We've done the big, brash sound; now we want to introduce some subtlety. It's a big change, granted, but we're still Idlewild.
"What really spurred me on was looking through my record collection and realising that the only bands I really like are those bands who continually change. Take a band like Wilco - they've gone from a good-time country sound to almost avant-garde stuff. And that's inspiring. It certainly inspired me to rethink how our band sounded."
It did help that Idlewild expanded from their core of three members to five over the last year. Their long-time touring second guitarist, Allan Stewart, was made a full member and Woomble poached bassist Gavin Fox from Irish rockers Turn: "We used to have Turn supporting us and I always thought that it would be great if Gavin were to join our band. He was the first person we considered when our last bass player left."
Idlewild's first attempt at Warnings/Promises involved all five members creating a 1980s stadium rock sound, with overdubs and effects pedals being brought into constant use. The sessions sounded like AC/DC and, while they were great fun to listen to, it wasn't the sound Idlewild wanted.
"We just took out the acoustic guitars and started from scratch," says Woomble. "We now had five different songwriters in the band and Gavin had a great voice, so we could do proper three-part harmonies. Also, Allan's guitar style was very different to mine, so that helped change the shape of the songs - in the past I would just overdub multiple guitar parts".
The band went deep into the Scottish Highlands to record the demos: "There's a guy up there who lets us use this big old house in the middle of nowhere. We just arrive with our equipment and it's all very strange and detached. And the locals are great."
Because everything seemed different - the band line-up, the nature of the new songs - they decided to record the album in Los Angeles. "Given all the changes, California seemed like a good idea. We had this crazy life in the sunshine, drinking Mexican beer and swimming in pools under the guise of purposeful work." Tony Hoffer, who has previously worked with Beck, Air and The Thrills, was brought in to produce.
Not only were the new songs considerably "rootsier" than anything they had ever done before, Woomble's lyrics went from the abstract variety to straight-ahead narratives. "I didn't want anything cryptic on this," he says, "and these songs are very easy to understand. There's plots and there's stories."
There are slow-burn anthems aplenty now, whereas once there were sub-three-minute power guitar workouts. Folky melodies have replaced the declamatory nature of past vocal approaches and, while it's certainly not a "country" album, there's a distinct Americana feel going on, albeit via Caledonian pop.
To prepare people for this "new" Idlewild (incidentally, the band aren't named after the original name of New York's JFK airport as always assumed; it's an Anne of Green Gables reference), this moshpit-friendly band did something that simply wouldn't have been considered one year previous: they embarked on an acoustic tour.
"There was an initial strange reaction from audience and band," Woomble says. "We did the full thing and decorated the stage and everything. We just did small theatres. We were never worried about how our original fans would take it - it was the drifting fans who were the hardest to impress. Anyway, you can't worry that much about how people who bought your early records are going to react to your new sound."
Recently voted "Third Best Scottish Band of All Time" after a massive three-month public vote, the band came in behind winners Belle and Sebastian and second placed Travis, but ahead of Primal Scream. (The Blue Nile came in at 40 and Lulu was at 48, you'll be thrilled to hear.)
Emboldened so far by the early reaction to the new work, Woomble says the band haven't quite finished their transmogrification, so there are further surprises in store: "We now have the right musical line-up and the confidence to take risks. And, obviously, if this record is more popular than our previous records, there will be even more risks taken. You have been warned."
Warnings/Promises is released on March 4th; the single Love Steals Us from Loneliness is out now. Idlewild play Dublin's Ambassador on April 28th and Belfast's Mandela Hall on April 29th
